“This is the school
nurse calling.” Oh no, she thought. My boy is sick. How will I drop everything and go get him?
“His teacher sent
him down for me to check his eyes.” His
eyes?
Early in the
young school year, the teacher had told mom that the boy didn’t know his
colors. Mom tried to explain that he did know his colors, at least the ones
he saw. His grandfather was red-green
colorblind, she told the teacher.
Maybe the teacher
didn’t believe mom, or forgot, or simply wanted to confirm it, so she sent the
grandson to the nurse when he mistook gray for pink or pink for gray or some
such thing. The school nurse confirmed
the diagnosis.
There it was,
hanging on the south wall, above the chalkboard, above the 11” X 6” panels of white
alphabet letters, capital and small, on black background at the front of the
classroom, my green deer. I really didn’t
notice it until the teacher made a comment about my green deer.
Then, juxtaposed
as it was with all the other brown deer hanging in a row, I could see a difference. I suppose I blushed. I was embarrassed. I think it began my life-long dislike of
anything that smacked of art, particularly art classes and art projects, which
thankfully ended about 4th or 5th grade.
Prior to that
experience, I had enjoyed the mess of watercolors, drawing figures, mostly
female, mostly buxom females. I think I
got the idea of big-bosomed ladies from the movie “Houdini” starring Tony Curtis. That may be imagination.
All those
memories came rushing back as I heard the report of grandson’s colorblindness. At least he got his diagnosis early. I was never really sure until chemistry lab
in my junior year in high school.
There had been
indications that I was colorblind, like when Dad admired the green wheat
growing west of the house in the evening sunlight. I thought it looked red, but I never said
anything. I wasn’t very old then.
Other
indications were when I confused two-toned ’56 Chevrolets, with red or green
panels. I knew which neighbors had the
green tone and which had the red tone, but I couldn’t always tell the
difference, especially from a distance.
There was that
slick page in the biology book when I was a freshman. We were studying the eye, rods and cones. It was a page full of colored dots. If you saw the word “color” in the dots, you
were normal. If you saw the word “onion”
among the dots, you were colorblind. I
could see both words.
In chemistry lab, my lab partner and I had to
mix a bunch of chemicals, let the stuff settle, then tell what color the
sediment was. My partner said it was
purple. I laughed. “That’s not purple,” I said. “It’s brown.”
We took the dispute
to Mr. Hare who asked us both what color we thought it was. When I said “brown”, he just looked at me,
smiled shook his head, and turned to other students. Was it purple? I looked again. No way that was purple.
But I have come to know that there is no
purple in my palette. Some purples will
seem red to me, or they will be blue. I
recall being accused of stealing sweat socks from the p.e. department because I
had on one blue sweat sock and one purple sweat sock, purple being the school
color. As I looked at my socks, I could
tell they were different shades, different shades of blue. No purple there.
All these things
came back to me in the aftermath of the lab experiment. I must be colorblind, I thought.
My
colorblindness would come back to haunt me, when I couldn’t pass colorblind
tests for my pilot license (restricted to daytime flight, no flight using
signal lights from control tower) and in trying to keep my CDL driver’s
license.
The pilot license
business didn’t matter because I only flew for a couple of years before giving
it up as too expensive for a hobby. As
for the CDL physical, I learned to game the system. The first time I failed the test, I had to go
to an optometrist and get her to sign off that my colorblindness wouldn’t
affect my ability to drive safely (this after 50 years of driving).
The next time I
went in for my physical, I glanced around for that blasted color chart, took a
good close look at it as I was ushered into the exam room, and memorized where
the green triangle was. There were three
colors in three corners of the chart, yellow, green and red.
No problem with the yellow. Up close, I could distinguish green from
red. After blood pressure, temperature,
heart rate, all the routine checks, we would go back out in the hall where I
stood at one end and read the letters and numbers on the chart at the other end.
“What color is
this?” the nurse asked, using a pencil to point to one of the colored
triangles. Ha! I passed easily, no optometrist needed.
Well, I am indeed
sorry I passed the trait to my grandson.
It will complicate his life some.
With an early start on it, he will easily adapt. If needed, I can tell him how to pass a CDL eye
exam.
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